Abstract
Similarities and differences between speech and writing have been the subject of innumerable studies, but until now there has been no attempt to provide a unified linguistic analysis of the whole range of spoken and written registers in English. In this widely acclaimed empirical study, Douglas Biber uses computational techniques to analyse the linguistic characteristics of twenty three spoken and written genres, enabling identification of the basic, underlying dimensions of variation in English. In Variation Across Speech and Writing, six dimensions of variation are identified through a factor analysis, on the basis of linguistic co-occurence patterns. The resulting model of variation provides for the description of the distinctive linguistic characteristics of any spoken or written text andd emonstrates the ways in which the polarization of speech and writing has been misleading, and thus enables reconciliation of the contradictory conclusions reached in previous research.
Keywords
Variation (astronomy)LinguisticsComputer scienceSubject (documents)Range (aeronautics)Identification (biology)Spoken languageNatural language processing
Related Publications
Longman Grammar of Spoken and Written English
Introduction Since its publication in 1985, the outstanding 1,800-page Comprehensive Grammar of the English Language, by Randolph Quirk, Sidney Greenbaum, Geoffrey Leech, and Ja...
An overlapping-feature-based phonological model incorporating linguistic constraints: Applications to speech recognition
Modeling phonological units of speech is a critical issue in speech recognition. In this paper, our recent development of an overlapping-feature-based phonological model that re...
Experiments on neural net recognition of spoken and written text
The problems are discussed of the recognition of handprinted and spoken digits and the handprinted and spoken English alphabet. Four such experiments were conducted and the resu...
The Psychology of Written Composition
The subject of this book is the mental activities that go into composing written texts. For brevity we will often refer to the subject simply as writing, but the term should not...
Perspectives on Variation
The significant advances witnessed over the last years in the broad field of linguistic variation testify to a growing convergence between sociolinguistic approaches and the som...
Publication Info
- Year
- 1988
- Type
- book
- Citations
- 5014
- Access
- Closed
External Links
Social Impact
Altmetric
PlumX Metrics
Social media, news, blog, policy document mentions
Citation Metrics
5014
OpenAlex
Cite This
Douglas Biber
(1988).
Variation across Speech and Writing.
Cambridge University Press eBooks
.
https://doi.org/10.1017/cbo9780511621024
Identifiers
- DOI
- 10.1017/cbo9780511621024